The functional role of the human amygdala in the evaluation of emotional facial expressions is unclear. Previous animal and human research shows that the amygdala participates in processing positive and negative reinforcement as well as in learning predictive associations between stimuli and subsequent reinforcement. Thus, amygdala response to facial expressions could reflect the processing of ...

In the present work we address the problem of phone duration modeling for the needs of emotional speech synthesis. Specifically, relying on ten well known machine learning techniques, we investigate the practical usefulness of two feature selection techniques, namely the Relief and the Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS) algorithms, for improving the accuracy of phone duration modeling. T...

Recent decades have witnessed tremendous advances in the neuroscience of emotion, learning and memory, and in animal models for understanding depression and anxiety. This review focuses on new rationally designed psychiatric treatments derived from preclinical human and animal studies. Nonpharmacological treatments that affect disrupted emotion circuits include vagal nerve stimulation, rapid tr...

In an ordinary classroom, teachers monitor their students’ emotional reactions while learning, even if only by glancing at their faces while they work. In this way, teachers can gauge the effectiveness of their teaching strategies, determining whether students are bored, frustrated, or anxious. Teachers can see how emotions change over time, perhaps from positive, to challenged, and later trium...

Oxytocin (OT) is becoming increasingly established as a prosocial neuropeptide in humans with therapeutic potential in treatment of social, cognitive, and mood disorders. However, the potential of OT as a general facilitator of human learning and empathy is unclear. The current double-blind experiments on healthy adult male volunteers investigated first whether treatment with intranasal OT enha...